Steve said:
There is no hypocrisy here. McCain had asked for revisions and considerations that actually improved veteran rights. He's had a long history of that but some people can't see the forest for the trees. Sometimes a bill is a bad bill.
You can think that if you want, but then you'd still be wrong. What you are believing is the typical, revisionist story or "spin" told well after the fact. Hypocrisy is there in spades.... McCain voted against several iterations of this bill previously, because, well, Bush and/or the party told him too. Bush was against the additional spending for the vets, even though the sum total for a whole damned year of benefits would cost less that two weeks' worth of our current involvement in Iraq. Remember, McCain has voted with the prez 90 to 95% of the time, depending upon your sources. That's
too damn close, especially for someone who claims to be a maverick. That, too, is a myth. But the maverick image certainly appeals to folks with a limited attention span. The McCain maverick of old died a decade or more ago.
Even when the new GI bill passed both houses - by a veto-proof, super-majority - Bush, stupidly
still threatened to veto it. When Bush did eventually sign the bill, he gave scant reference to its patron, democrat Jim Webb, and didn't at all mention the bill's other patron, Senator Chuck Hagel, a republican. Hagel and Webb are both decorated vets. Instead, Bush praised McCain for his support of the bill. What a fucking lie...McCain was AWOL - like Bush has been in the past. Any Congressperson who voted against this bill needs to be ridden out of town on a rail - to keep with the western metaphor.
"John McCain needs to be on this bill," Webb said earlier. "I have said to him several times that this is not a political issue - this is about providing a fair, deserved benefit to our troops. Based on his own military history and how strongly he speaks about the positive contributions of the people who have served, I hope that he will get on board and support this new GI bill." Nope. He was a no-show...and I hope vets remember this.
Now if McCain would repudiate some of his painfully-close ties to Bush's failed policies and presidency, actually come out and say he'll "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" as well as ALL the laws of the land and not use signing-statements to circumvent any law they see fit to, then I might,
maybe be able to vote for him. But I don't see much hope in that.
The one fact that provides me some limited amount of comfort, politically speaking, is that McCain - if he is indeed elected - won't be anywhere near as abysmal as Bush - or rather the
real president - Cheney. But I could be wrong....
And for all the Bush apologists out there, how come Cheney is the first veep in the better part of a century not to try to move up a notch? Could it be that he has numbers only a point or two above Satan or Voldermort?